The situation may not be perfect today, but communication to/from prisons are heavily guarded to prevent these situations and others.
Inmates in most countries can make phone calls only to phone numbers which have been approved, usually only family. You can't make random phone calls. All phone calls are monitored and recorded to prevent abuse.
You can't call an inmate afaik, that would be a very low security facility, which I am not aware of.
Visitors are only by request and undergo security checks before, during and after visits. And yes, visitors are a huge security issue in prisons, but if you deny all visitors to prisoners, you're in Guantanamo, not a normal prison anymore. There are different levels of security in prisons.
Internet access is much harder to control. Encryption is, as you as a HN reader know, very easy to do on a computer, but hard using your voice. Hiding information on a computer is easy, but very hard on a voice phone.
There have been prisons in the world that allowed internet access to inmates and there are problems with that, much as with visitors or phone calls. It's a balancing act to weigh those problems to the benefits. You just have to go into the discussion with open eyes about the problems that internet access would bring. Imagine a pedophile convicted for sexually harassing children online, and giving him/her internet access in prison. What an outrage. Someone in a low sec jail for DUI could be given internet access, no problems. It happends, I've even seen a CEO run his company from within the jail. He was given supervised internet access to his companys financial system once a month, one guard watching pover his shoulder at all times. Not a very scalable solution though.
> The situation may not be perfect today, but communication to/from prisons are heavily guarded to prevent these situations and others.
That's pretty funny. Contraband cell phones are ridiculously common in prison. I had a buddy of mine in prison, was there for four years. At one point he started calling me from jail, from a contraband phone.
He called me often enough and we chatted long enough on these calls that I got the feeling that there wasn't any sort of real scarcity when it comes to communications in prison.
The phones had Internet access, he would update his Facebook page from prison. At one point he even asked me for money so that he could buy his own contraband cell phone. (I said no)
As for scalability... I was thinking that for sure free access to internet would be very hard to monitor, but say you limit it to email: That would be certainly much, much easier (hence cheaper) to monitor than what we currently have.
Every written letter must be opened and read, possibly with an horrible script which takes time to "decipher". Besides, I don't know if they keep copies of all the mail in case something happens, but it would be orders of magnitude harder to index and search than email anyway. Phone calls are even worse, since you need at least as much time to monitor the conversation as the conversation lasts.
Maybe introducing email would shift some of the friends and family to use this cheaper means of communication, reducing costs. Or maybe Jevons paradox applies here and the number of emails would go up to such an extent that the improved efficiency would not make up for the increased traffic.
P.S.: just to make it clear, I'm not advocating for the inmates to have their phone calls replaced for emails.
Inmates in most countries can make phone calls only to phone numbers which have been approved, usually only family. You can't make random phone calls. All phone calls are monitored and recorded to prevent abuse. You can't call an inmate afaik, that would be a very low security facility, which I am not aware of.
Visitors are only by request and undergo security checks before, during and after visits. And yes, visitors are a huge security issue in prisons, but if you deny all visitors to prisoners, you're in Guantanamo, not a normal prison anymore. There are different levels of security in prisons.
Internet access is much harder to control. Encryption is, as you as a HN reader know, very easy to do on a computer, but hard using your voice. Hiding information on a computer is easy, but very hard on a voice phone. There have been prisons in the world that allowed internet access to inmates and there are problems with that, much as with visitors or phone calls. It's a balancing act to weigh those problems to the benefits. You just have to go into the discussion with open eyes about the problems that internet access would bring. Imagine a pedophile convicted for sexually harassing children online, and giving him/her internet access in prison. What an outrage. Someone in a low sec jail for DUI could be given internet access, no problems. It happends, I've even seen a CEO run his company from within the jail. He was given supervised internet access to his companys financial system once a month, one guard watching pover his shoulder at all times. Not a very scalable solution though.
It all depends, doesn't it.